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Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Grandpa Fazz gave me some cool old work gloves and a vintage slide hammer dent puller.

I stopped to visit my buddy Dave, he's welding some new floors in his '67 Ford.

I finished bending my brake lines. The rears go into a custom tab I welded on a few years ago.

The front brake lines mate with the factory mounting point that I modified a few weeks ago.

Here is a shot of the front brake line routing. The right front line has 18 bends in it! This will be hidden above the heat shield and behind the suspension crossmember, so the only section visible will be the master cylinder area.

It's hard to get a good shot of this, but the four lines are symmetric and parallel until they diverge just below the firewall.

I'm ashamed to even post this picture, but I spent some time this weekend cleaning up some sins I had committed a few years ago. Sometime between 6 and 7 years ago, I scabbed a few patch panels into the floor to pass inspection. This work was no longer up to my standards. In the foreground you can see a lap joint which was welded from the top, and in the background you can see an angle piece welded to the frame rail.

In my defense, the angle piece was fully welded from the inside. I was doing this repair work from above, with the carpets out, and I only laid a few tacks on the bottom. I cut the offending piece out, and also ground away the bottom half of the lap joint.

I formed a new piece of the frame rail from 16ga steel and tried to match the factory curvature.

In this picture you can see I had to do a bit of shrinking and stretching to match the original frame rail.

When I was happy with the shape, I marked the final cut in the original steel with a scribe.

After everything was cut and trimmed, I tacked the patch panel in place. This time I'm using butt welds instead of lap welds.

All welded and ground smooth. It's not 100% perfect, but it's considerably better than the old crap!

Next I have to build the hydraulic lines, which will require a few bulkhead fittings. I made a bunch of bulkhead mounting points, I'm going to take these to Bill Lewis for some TIG welding.